Despite the progress many organizations are making toward implementing electronic health records systems, there's still an awful lot of paper in the healthcare world. So when disaster strikes--such as the Midwest floods this April or the tornado that hit Joplin, MO, in May--virtually every organization is at risk of losing some kind of data.
A new fund set up by the charitable arm of the American Health Information Management Association, the AHIMA Foundation, aims to help association members return to work to help their organizations recover that data after a fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, or other disaster.
When computers or other equipment used to store health data suffer flood, fire, or storm damage, an electronic data restoration company can often save the day. But to ensure they do so in a way that's compliant with privacy laws, the American Health Information Management Association says contracts should ensure the company takes measures not to use or disclose recovered information and uses safeguards to prevent the use or disclosure of the information.
The contract should also detail which methods will be used to recover the data and how long it will take to return the information and/or equipment. And don't forget a termination clause that goes into effect if the business partner violates any material term of the contract. AHIMA has a number of recommendations for contract provisions.
Even when damaged equipment is beyond the help of data recovery or restoration techniques, there are places to look for data, and some can be pieced together from different sources, AHIMA says.
"The national association's goal is, of course, to support those members though the good times and those bad times. And this spring has certainly been representative of some of those bad times,” Midwestern native Rose T. Dunn, AHIMA's interim chief executive officer, said in a phone interview.
News coverage of disasters often highlights hospitals that are impacted by storms and other natural disasters. But when it comes to data recovery, smaller healthcare organizations such as neighborhood clinics and physician offices can be hit just as hard--if not harder.
"Unfortunately, many of those types of smaller ambulatory centers are typically paper-based and so they have much more chance of having that material lost forever, especially with flooding," Dunn says.
And it's not just medical records that are at risk in small, paper-based organizations. "Not only have they lost all the health information for all those patients, if they've lost all of their computer systems and their files they have lost even all of the forms and everything that they would use to reopen," AHIMA board member Lynn Kuehn said in an interview.
Further complicating data recovery after disasters is the fact that health information professionals often work outside of the clinical setting.
"Much of the non-patient care teams in healthcare facilities today do work remotely," Kuehn "So those individuals--coding professionals, transcription professionals, those who perform cancer registry operations and activities of those sort--are all done remotely today for the most part. So those individuals, when they lose their homes … those computers are toast. Folks need to be able to replace that technology in order to get back to work."
The AHIMA Foundation's Health Information Relief Operation Fund, will give cash grants to health information professionals who need help after a natural or man-made disaster. Seeded by a $10,000 donation by AHIMA, the HIRO Fund (pronounced "hero") is currently accepting applications and donations on its website.
AHIMA will also assist members who have trouble paying their membership dues or completing continuing education credits to maintain their certification due to disaster. And it plans to update its disaster preparedness and recovery resources, including a number of free online articles, tools, and templates.
"We never know when something's going to hit," Kuehn says. "Joplin told us that--overnight their world changed with 20 minutes of warning. We need to be prepared ahead of time--and that's what our field is all about; disaster planning and making sure we are one step ahead of the game."
See Also:
Health Data Recovery: 5 Places to Search for Lost Data
5 Must-Have Provisions in a Data Recovery Contract